


Stan Pines, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being an Intergalactic Crime Boss

by WDW



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: (if you want it to be), Gen, Same Coin Theory (Gravity Falls), Stanuary 2021, pardon the dr strangelove reference, stan is smart but in an organizational change way, who knew
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-12 20:48:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28891620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WDW/pseuds/WDW
Summary: Stan hadn't meant to get locked up in space jail. He especially didn't expect to break out of space jail and end up as an intergalactic crime boss.It just sort of happened.(For Stanuary: Crime)
Comments: 27
Kudos: 92
Collections: Stanuary





	Stan Pines, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Being an Intergalactic Crime Boss

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Pyramid Scheme](https://archiveofourown.org/works/26690104) by [illumynare](https://archiveofourown.org/users/illumynare/pseuds/illumynare). 



> guess who got coviddddd (from taking care of sick parents) 
> 
> (stay home kids 10/10 do not recommend contracting coronavirus) 
> 
> anyways i lived and here's fic for STANUARY
> 
> (can be read as same coin theory or not - up to you whether stan goes to space jail because of it or if it was just a paperwork mix-up, idk)

Going to jail in space wasn't that bad, all things considered. He got three square meals a day here, plus the occasional fruit snack. Stan would have taken it over Colombia any day of the week.

Sure, his food got doled out to him by a seven-foot-tall squid person wearing protective gear, right out of a barrel labeled 'CARBON-BASED ORGANISMS ONLY'. And though his fellow inmates had little interest in his smuggled cigarettes, they were all too happy to shake him down for glucose chews.

But hey, he wasn't expecting a five-star experience. As long as _he_ didn't end up on the menu, there was nothing worse that space jail could throw at him that the American penitentiary system hadn't already tried.

Under any other circumstances, Stan Pines would have been enjoying himself and taking his sweet time doing it. Take in the sights, people-watch, con a few neon pink slime blobs. All the things you do when you go somewhere new.

Besides, he had learned years ago that when the universe gave him the chance to lie low for a little while, he should just shut up and take the hint. Stan didn't remember the name of the latest guy who wanted his head on a plate, but he knew exactly how much money Stan had cost him. Being a billion lightyears away from him? That suited Stan just _fine_.

If only he was locked up here for something he actually did _._

(It was a new experience for him to be actually innocent. He hated it.)

* * *

Stan had been running a con down in Tennessee when they grabbed him.

He had been distracted, counting through the thick wad of bills he had gotten from his latest batch of sore losers when the lights exploded overhead. Still, it was only when people started running right past him and out the door screaming that it hit him that something may be going a bit sideways.

Stan looked up from his haul just in time to see a giant glowing portal appear with a ground-shaking _schlorp,_ just several feet in front of him.

He looked on slack-jawed as several heavily-armored soldiers stepped out of the rip in reality. The wooden flooring of the cheap bar he had set up at for the week, stained wet dark with decades of cheap alcohol and bodily fluids, creaked, splintered, and finally sunk a solid inch under their weight.

Someone behind him shrieked, pushed over a barstool, and fled. Stan swallowed, a new pit opening up in his gut. He knew without even looking that he was the last one left.

Him, and these guys.

They took one look at him and hefted their massive, glowing laserguns over their shoulders right in his direction. Guns were guns, even when they were seven-foot-long and glowed. Stan stuck his hands up in an easy, practiced motion, but not before he first jammed the bills into his pants pocket.

Old habits being what they were, he started to babble. "Look, I don't know who sent you, but you've got the wrong guy. I've never heard of Stan Pines in my damn life. Or Hal Forrester. They both equally aren't me!"

One of the soldiers cleared their throat.

"We, the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron, hereby place you under arrest for 33,840,219 counts of time-space manipulation, 27 counts of civilization destruction via recursive paradox-handling, and one count of unregulated inhabitance of the second dimension."

Stan blinked. "...You're space cops?"

The guy didn't even blink. "We, the Time Paradox Avoidance Enforcement Squadron -"

"Right, okay," he waved them off before they could leap into another hour of exposition. This was all starting to make a lot more sense. "Look, time cops, whatever. You've got the wrong guy."

"Explain."

"Well, uh, first of all. I've never destroyed a civilization, let alone through a, uh, recursion-whatever." Stan hesitated. "...And I don't know what unregulated inhabitance of the second dimension is, but I would have known if I done it!"

The guy looked at him flatly. Their disbelief at Stan's depth of stupidity was clear even through their green, glowing visor.

"That is incorrect. You have in fact destroyed 27 civilizations."

Stan forced a laugh. He was the only one who did. "Okay, alright, I get it. This is a joke, right?" He gestured at their get-ups, all black spandex and glowy bits. "Bet ya pay a fortune in energy bills for these things."

The lazer guns hummed on with a roar, one he felt in his bones.

Stan swallowed. Maybe everything else about this situation was an elaborate fake, but he knew the sound of a real weapon and there was a half dozen of them pointed right at him.

"We do," the guy says crisply. Their inability to even notice Stan's insult to their person was just unfair. "And you are under arrest."

Then they carted him off to space jail.

He was supposed to be in some other worse place to start, but after they strip-searched him and determined that he was a carbon-based organism of sufficient harmlessness that required food and water to survive, he got shoved into what had looked very much like regular jail but with a lot more more brightly-colored aliens.

No fancy lights or chrome plating. There wasn't even stainless steel. Turned out aliens liked their concrete as much as government contractors did. Stan felt a bit betrayed.

Admittedly, this far into his stay here, he really couldn't be sure how much time had passed since he had first gotten thrown in here. He had tried marking days on the walls to start, but it didn't really work out with the three sun situation.

But it wasn't all bad. Like he's said, the food was pretty damn decent by prison standards. And turned out space jail had a space library since whoever or whatever 'Time Baby' was, it was a whole lot more generous with prisoner enrichment funding than either the American or Colombian governments.

He's even been doing a little reading.

Stan had never done any of this stuff in his other stints in jail. He was surprised to find that he kinda liked it.

And, he'd made a couple of friends. Most of them were at least twice his height and at least one was pretty much constantly on fire, but they were better company than Rico and even Jimmy was. Even on their good days - by which he meant, even before they actively started wanting to skin him alive.

Because, and Stan had taken ages to wrap his head around it, the guys here _liked_ him.

He was a talker. He had been told that more times than he strictly felt comfortable with. What he was still getting used to was the feeling of people actually wanting to hear him.

Sure, a lot of it was probably because a good third of the other guys here didn't have two vocal cords to rub together. And it wasn't like he got special treatment or anything like that. Like he said, he got his glucose chews swiped just as much as any of the guys in his cellblock.

But one day, some of them start following him around. There's this big purple guy that drove him up the wall at first. A pink cyclops who damn near burned his eyebrows off when he flirted with her on old instinct. And a growing number of others, all of whom had trickled in over the weeks and months.

They sat at his table and listened to him when he complained about his shit luck, what with not getting due process the one time it would have actually worked out for him. And when he came up with this crazy jailbreak plan one day, a total leap of faith that wouldn't work in a million years, not even one of them laughed in his face.

They even asked him questions.

Then one day, some glitchy-looking cloud of higher consciousness tried to cut him in line for lunch and Xanthar sent xem right into the twelfth dimension with a supersonic bellow.

He wasn't expecting the interception. Honestly, Stan figured he just had to take it. He was one of the smallest guys around here and had a physical form to boot, so he had resigned himself to being kicked around and giving up whatever someone else wanted. Besides, too many glucose chews gave him the runs.

After that, though, Stan did some thinking. Sure, Xanthar got on his nerves sometimes. But when someone sends a guy into the twelfth dimension for cutting you in line, that meant something. Besides, Stan didn't exactly have enough friends to be turning his nose up at someone just for being a bread with legs. And after befriending a bread with legs, why _not_ anyone else?

Point of all that is, now he's got a bunch of alien henchmen slash friends - and halfway decent poker buddies on the weekends, long as he was fine with cleaning residual slime off his cards.

It had worked out pretty decently, all things considered. He even got these little plastic card covers made.

* * *

Eight years later, give or take a half-dozen deportations from linear time, Stan just narrowly resisted the urge to go back in time to beat his past self over the head with a club.

That was saying a lot, considering he had the man - or rather, the conscious blob of cosmic lint - power to actually make it happen. Came with being an intergalactic crime boss and all. Besides, Dennis owed him a favor.

...Stan wished he had more explanation for that last bit than he did, but it was true nonetheless. In his defense, he hadn't _meant_ to take over space jail.

He had tried to break out of jail, which was justified. He was innocent! But in order to pull off the jailbreak, he and the guys had to commit a couple of - _petty!_ \- crimes. Thefts and stuff. A couple cons, here and there. More than a fair bit of sleazy exchanges and pickpocketing. Nothing anyone would ever notice.

Then the jailbreak had turned into a full-on prisoner revolt. And after the fires went out and the Time Cops zoomed off, Stan ended up... well, in _charge_ was probably not the best word for it, considering any of his friends could squash him with minimal effort. But he had always had a good sense for numbers and, despite popular belief, a prefrontal cortex. That made him a bit of an anomaly in the group. Stan hadn't gone to college and probably never will, but he had a sinking feeling his new friends had the common sense of twenty-foot-tall collegiate fraternity brothers.

They weren't bad people. They had their hearts, if not most of their other internal organs, in the right place. They just didn't really think, and coming from Stan, that was saying something.

Hell, he wasn't even sure that Xanthar had a brain.

That was around when Stan started making deals. It started off as survival, just a couple bargains in the backroom of the multiverse bar. Then the stakes got higher. More doors began to open for him. He started getting some high-profile deals under his belt. Suddenly, Stanley was shaking hands and slapping backs with some of the _real_ heavyweights out there in the multiverse - even a couple of paracausal beings, and those don't drift into linear time for just anyone!

And the best part is, all the deals were in his favor. Stan could see it as easy as breathing, with a clarity that he had previously felt only one other time in his life.

He knew exactly what to do and say to get someone to do something. It felt like magic. It was power. He began to like the thrill of it. Stan allowed himself to be buoyed up by the confidence it gave him, leaning into the rush to pull off his best cons.

On the bright side, no one in particular wanted to mess with him now. On the not-so-bright side, every wannabe criminal in the multiverse wanted to audition for the role of his right-hand man.

"Spot's taken, folks." Pyronica would say, waving off yet another glum looking blob who trudged away with the defeated air of a mid-career bureaucrat. "Go find your own megalomaniac to chum up to."

In all honesty, Stan wasn't thinking much about why he was doing it. It was fun. It was fulfilling, more or less. And he was good at it. That was much more than what he could say about the years before the Time Cops caught up to him in Tennessee.

It was enough. It had to be enough. But as good of a liar Stan was, he couldn't let himself believe it.

That was his mistake.

* * *

"Boss, Time Baby's throwing a tantrum." Kryptos swallowed. "It's... about you."

Stan went still. He knew what that meant, and judging by how the room had gone dead silent, he wasn't the only one.

There were things you messed with in the universe. There were things you very much did not. Minor gods - no pun intended - fell very much in the latter category.

In hindsight, it was a minor miracle Time Baby hadn't noticed him before, considering the prison revolt he kinda made happen. Maybe Stan had just been lucky.

Not that it helped him now.

"Me?" He forced a chuckle, but it caught in his throat. "I haven't done anything other than break outta that jail of his, just like all of you. Why _me_?"

"Maybe he found out you got the meeting on the Axolotl's calendar?"

"What!" Stan couldn't help but fume. Seriously, of all things to get busted for? This was like getting caught for tax fraud after robbing a diamond store! "I got that fair and square, flirted with the secretary and everything!"

"I dunno!" Krptos squirmed. "But boss, he said he won't follow bedtime if you aren't locked up and rotting in the Nightmare Realm by the end of the month. All of the Time Cops are out for _blood_."

Stan felt faint.

"...Boss?"

"Shut it, Kryptos," someone whispered to the side. Probably Pyronica.

"I'm gonna go to bed early," Stan said slowly, face ashen, and fled to his room.

* * *

That night, he dreamed for the first time in eight years.

In his dream, Stan stood up gingerly. He felt, strangely enough, like he had just woken up on the first day of vacation. He felt warm and full, like all of summer was spread out before him. It had been so long, he almost couldn't recognize the feeling.

He felt perfectly fine, and that was his first real clue that something was deeply wrong. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't muster up even a scrap of fear or concern about the fact that he was very obviously standing on thin air.

Behind him came an aborted gasp. With his trademark distinct lack of self-preservation, Stan turned around without thinking.

For a moment, he thought it was himself, standing there across from him. But no. Stan took in the thick lopsided glasses, the lean frame, the look of stunned recognition he knew was reflected on his own face.

_Even worse._

His brother stared at Stan with a look of what he could only describe as complete befuddlement.

"Stanley? What on Earth are you doing in my dream?"

**Author's Note:**

> experimenting with shorter, more self-contained, weirder stories for stanuary this year as a writing exercise. let me know what you think! will be back to updating my WIPs soon
> 
> it's been a long while, i've missed you all!
> 
> PS. props to illumynare because 'pyramid scheme' inspired this in so many ways. in some ways, this is just an inverse of the situation there!


End file.
